Evolution's Captain
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She threw herself on her back, kicked & cried, precisely like a naughty child.—She then looked very sulky & after two or three fits of pashion, the keeper said, “Jenny if you will stop bawling & be a good girl, I will give you this apple.—” She certainly understood every word of this, &, though like a child, she had great work to stop whining, she at last succeeded, & then got the apple, with which she jumped into a chair & began eating it, with the most contented countenance imaginable.
Remembering the relentless demands of “yammerschooner,” Darwin went home and wrote in his notebook: “Compare the Fuegian & Ourang outang & dare to say difference so great.”
Three years earlier, in Tierra del Fuego, he had written in his diary, “Nature, by making habit omnipotent, has fitted the Fuegian to the climate & productions of his country,” already unconsciously anticipating his new thinking about the “transformism,” as he first thought of it, of species.
He wasn’t afraid of what he was thinking. From all he had seen on his five-year circumnavigation, it made sense. The scientist in him embraced it. However, he was well aware of its religious impropriety. It was after all blasphemy, and Darwin was not a bold man in his researches. But he was conscientious. He had no wish to be controversial, so he kept his musings to himself. That summer of 1837 he started scribbling in notebooks, jotting down and organizing such thoughts. It would be twenty-two years before he published his ideas about transmutation, and then he did so only because another naturalist, a malaria-ridden Englishman wandering through Borneo, shocked him into action by sending him a letter suggesting identical conclusions.
Darwin finished his account of the voyage in September 1837, after nine months of concentrated transcription and editing of his own journals. It contained no allusion to his ideas on the transmutation of species. It was simply a fabulously adventurous travel book, filled with the descriptions of a teeming natural world by a remarkably observant scientist. There was nothing in it to offend anybody. He sent it off to the publisher, Henry Colburn, whose office was conveniently close by, on Great Marlborough Street in London where Darwin himself was living. The finished narrative, to be included with the three volumes FitzRoy was preparing, was due to be published the following year, 1838, but Colburn’s inquiries to FitzRoy about the date of his completion met with evasion.
FitzRoy was desperately trying to pull together a mass of chronologically overlapping, generally uninspiring seafaring accounts by three different authors into some sort of readable shape. He was brittle and ready to snap.
He finally did so when Darwin sent him the preface to his account in November.
FitzRoy reacted to it with a cold fury. Darwin’s preface, he wrote back to him, showed a shameful lack of acknowledgment of all those aboard the Beagle—not only the captain himself but the ship’s officers—who had tirelessly and generously assisted Darwin, looked after him, gave up room for him, put his well-being before their own on all occasions, and generally made possible all his efforts throughout the voyage, and of course, subsequently, the publication of his book. FitzRoy was right. Darwin had offered little thanks to the men who had nursed him through seasickness and looked after him as a favored guest for five years. There was no distinction made between Beaufort’s kindness in allowing Darwin to go on the voyage and FitzRoy’s unbounded generosity to him both as a guest and with the facilities of the Admiralty in shipping home his collection.
Darwin apologized. He rewrote his preface in more generous terms.
But there was more than slighting acknowledgment and offended feelings to their growing estrangement. Something else was happening to drive the two men irreconcilably far apart. Within two years of returning to England, both experienced profound changes of thought that were in direct and contentious opposition.
While Darwin was moving ineluctably toward scientific enlightenment, FitzRoy was heading fast in the other direction.
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Sometime between coming home in October 1836 and finishing his narrative two and a half years later—perhaps under the influence of his new wife—FitzRoy discovered, or rediscovered, an ardent faith in God and in the literal word of the Bible, which he had begun to reread with the closest of attention. This would bring an end to any warmth left in his relationship with his former shipmate.
Perhaps Darwin had mentioned his thoughts about transforming species when they’d taken tea together. This was more than likely after their many years of scientific discussion and debate over shared meals. Such thoughts would have drawn a ferocious response from the captain and sent Darwin away musing angrily about an ill-humored crank.
FitzRoy read Darwin’s book. Its inferential trend—all those proliferating species—even without conclusions, would have been quite clear to him. He found it abominable, full of heresy.
The only quadruped native to the island is a large wolf-like fox which is common to both East and West Falkland. I have no doubt it is a peculiar species, and confined to this archipelago…
This clearly implied the sort of natural, rather than God-designed, transmutation that had infuriated FitzRoy over tea. Having invited him to write a book, and made arrangements with their publisher, FitzRoy could hardly now stop Darwin or edit him. But he could oppose Darwin’s views. So he went back into his own book to argue with him.
The only difference between the Patagonian and the Falkland foxes, FitzRoy declared, was their size and thickness of coat, and this he could readily explain.
Naturalists say that these foxes are peculiar to this archipelago, and they find difficulty in acounting for their presence in that quarter only. That they are now peculiar cannot be doubted; but how long they have been so is a very different question. As I know that three hairy sheep, brought to England from Sierra Leone in Africa, became wooly in a few years, and that wooly sheep soon become hairy in a hot country (besides that their outward form alters considerably after a few generations); and as I have seen and heard of wild cats, known to have been born in a domestic state, whose size surpassed that of their parents so much as to be remarkable; whose coats had become long and rough; and whose physiognomies were quite different from those of their race who were still domestic; I can see nothing extraordinary in foxes carried from Tierra del Fuego to Falkland Island becoming longer-legged, more bulky, and differently coated.
Darwin of course was suggesting nothing more than this sort of natural adaptation. But he termed the later models new species, and here FitzRoy, and countless others, took virulent issue with him and with the implications of such evolutionary thinking. Foxes and birds might change a bit, but men did not grow from monkeys.
After two and a half years sorting through and preparing his two volumes and many appendixes, delaying publication of the multivolume book by a year, then finally finishing, FitzRoy now added two more chapters to his Volume Two. They were his rebuttal to Darwin’s unwholesome line of thought.
Chapter 27, titled “Remarks on the Early Migrations of the Human Race,” began:
Having ended my narrative of the Beagle’s voyage, I might lay down the pen: but there are some reflections, arising out of circumstances witnessed by myself, and enquiries since made respecting them, that I feel anxious to lay before those who take an interest in such subjects….
He went on to discuss the “various countenances, heads, shapes, sizes, colours, and other peculiarities of the human race.” He provided a table, “Castes arising from the mixture of European, Indian, and Negro,” of at least twenty-three “distinct varieties of the human race” which he observed in the city of Lima, Peru: White, Creole, Indian, Mestiso, Negro, Mulatto, Quateron, Zambo…
Having seen how all the varieties of colour may be produced from white, red, and black, we pause, because at fault, and so we should remain, did we rely on our own unassisted reason. But, turning to the Bible, we find in the history of those by whom the earth was peopled, after the flood, a curse pronounced on Ham and his descendents; and it is curious that the name Ham should mean “hea
t-brown-scorched,” while that of Cush his son, means “Black;” that Japheth should imply “handsome,” and that Shem, from whose line our Saviour was descended, should mean “name—renown—he who is put or placed.”
The Bible made it clear, FitzRoy wrote, that the cursed Negro descendents of Cush ended up as the black, red, and brown “aborigines” of the southerly world of Africa, Australia, and the Pacific islands, while the handsome, renowned, and white descendants of Shem and Japheth made their way to northern Europe.
FitzRoy’s genealogy presses on with unquestioned sure-footedness and an avid racial speculation that wouldn’t be out of place in pamphlets published by today’s white Aryan brotherhoods.
It is likely that some of Abraham’s bond-women were either black or mulatto, being descendents of Ham; perhaps of Cush: and it is hardly possible that Hagar should not have been dark, even black, considering her parentage; in which case Ishmael would have been copper-coloured, or mulatto, and some, if not all of Abraham’s sons by concubines, would have been of those colours.
These descendants of Noah, once civilized, began a migratory spread across the globe—FitzRoy limns this movement adeptly as a seaman, making the same case Thor Heyerdhal did with Kon Tiki for the drift of primitive man across the oceans on log and reed craft. He finds a deeper, surer root of ancestry for his voyagers than Heyerdhal: “No one…can read about those countries…without being struck by the traces of Hebrew ceremonies and rites…scattered through the more populous, if not through all the nations upon earth.”
But, except for that fortunate branch of the Shem-Japheth clan that forked west and north and finally turned into Englishmen, FitzRoy reasoned that these wanderers became increasingly primitive, falling farther from grace with the distance and length of time they roamed from the influence of holy precincts.
Let us suppose, for illustration, that a party of men and women left Asia Minor in a civilized state. Before they had wandered far, no writing materials or clothes would have remained…and their children would have been taught only to provide for daily wants, food, and perhaps some substitute for clothes, such as skins. Their grand-children would have been in a still worse condition as to information or traces of civilization, and in each succeeding generation would have fallen lower on the scale, until they became savages in the fullest sense of the words; from which degraded condition they would not rise a step by their own exertions.
None in all the wandering, forgetful tribes of Israel had fallen lower than the Fuegian, the human nadir at the bottom of the trajectory, whom FitzRoy had tried so hard to raise up again.
So FitzRoy approached his main argument—his rebuttal to what would, in time, be called Darwinism.
That man could have been first created in an infant, or a savage state, appears to my apprehension impossible;…because—if an infant—who nursed, who fed, who protected him till able to subsist alone? and, if a savage, he would have been utterly helpless. Destitute of the instinct possessed by brutes,—with organs inexperienced (however perfect), and with a mind absolutely vacant; neither his eye, his ear, his hand, nor his foot would have been available, and after a few hours of apathetic existence he must have perished. The only idea I can reconcile to reason is that man was created perfect in body, perfect in mind, and knowing by inspiration enough for the part he had to perform;—such a being it would be worse than folly to call savage.
Have we a shadow of ground for thinking that wild animals or plants have improved since their creation? Can any reasonable man believe that the first of a race, species, or kind, was the most inferior?
In his final chapter, FitzRoy summoned all his circumnavigating experience and common sense to refute the Lyellian view of geology and the doctrines of transmutation that went with it, which directly contradicted the Book of Genesis. Chapter 28 is titled “A Very Few Remarks with Reference to the Deluge.”
I suffered much anxiety in former years from a disposition to doubt, if not disbelieve, the inspired History written by Moses. I knew so little of that record, or of the intimate manner in which the Old Testament is connected with the New, that I fancied some events there related might be mythological or fabulous, while I sincerely believed the truth of others; a wavering between opinions, which could only be productive of an unsettled, and therefore unhappy, state of mind….
Much of my own uneasiness was caused by reading works written by men of Voltaire’s school; and by those of geologists who contradict, by implication, if not in plain terms, the authenticity of the Scriptures; before I had any acquaintance with the volume they so incautiously impugn…. For men who, like myself formerly, are willingly ignorant of the Bible, and doubt its divine inspiration, I can only have one feeling—sincere sorrow….
While led away by sceptical ideas, and knowing extremely little of the Bible, one of my remarks to a friend, on crossing vast plains composed of rolled stones bedded in diluvial detritus some hundred feet in depth, was “this could never have been effected by a forty days’ flood.”
The “friend” FitzRoy had confided his doubting remarks to had been Darwin. It was April 1834; they were exploring in the whaleboats, sailing inland from the Atlantic coast up the Santa Cruz River in southern Argentina. The river cut across an austere, flat, brownish-yellow Patagonian plain that was evidently comprised of “sea-worn” smooth stones, which FitzRoy and Darwin found embedded 100 feet below the cliff tops of the river’s high southern banks. This seemed to prove the truth of Charles Lyell’s claims that the geology of the earth had evolved gradually, over an unimaginably long period of time. Here were signs of an eon of inundation and sea action wearing small and smooth the rocks of a sea bottom, now long exposed since the withdrawal of water. It did not seem possible, as FitzRoy had said, that such an effect could have been produced by a temporary flooding.
Yet four years later he was convinced of the callowness of his earlier opinion. It was the ubiquitous seashell, beloved of geologists to prove their point, that FitzRoy used to prove his. If land had sunk slowly over thousands of years, he wrote, to be covered by the sea and then, just as slowly rise again above it, seashells would only be found beneath layers of sediment, mud, and rock strata. But FitzRoy and Darwin had found the cliffs along the Santa Cruz River to be entirely composed from top to bottom of a well-blended mix of earth and shells. This, he reasoned, was the result of water “rushing to and fro, tearing up and heaping together shells which once grew regularly or in beds…and from those shells alone my own mind is convinced, (independent of the Scripture) that this earth has undergone an universal deluge.” Here was proof geological.
The flood came handily to his aid in dealing with the problem of the extinction of the dinosaurs. His explanation of the modern absence of the largest animals—dinosaurs—whose bones were then being unearthed around the world (including the bones of giant rhinoceroses, elephants, and saber-tooth tigers that had been discovered a few years earlier by workmen laying the foundations of what was to become Trafalgar Square), is perfectly understandable.
Proud man would, in all probability, have despised the huge construction of Noah, and laughed to scorn the idea that the mountains could be covered, even when he saw the waters rising. Thither, in his moral blindness, he would have fled, with numbers of animals that were excluded from the ark, or did not go to it; for we do not see all animals, even of one kind, equally instinctive. As the creatures approached the ark, might it not have been easy to admit some, perhaps the young and small, while the old and large were excluded?
What sound reasoning. Commonsense housekeeping would dictate that Noah and his boys stop the huge, the too troublesome, the undomesticable, and the most ferocious animals at the gangplank.
Dealing with some of the more commonly voiced objections to a flood, FitzRoy used the observations of the astronomer and mathematician Sir John Herschel (who later vehemently disputed the possibility of evolution and stated that the creation of species was an act of God, the “mystery of mysteries”):
How wide was the gulf between Darwin and FitzRoy. Darwin stood at the threshold of an expansion of thought and science that would not be equaled for a hundred years, until the technological impetus of World War II incubated the atomic age. FitzRoy in his way was no less a scientist; he read widely and with great discipline, and he applied what he had read with an elastic reason to an epic voyage of discovery. But he was stuck, deeply, by prejudice and the cleaving to an old order, to a mind-set a thousand and more years old, when science was subservient to religion. That order was about to be toppled, and the constructs of the Bible smashed like an old wooden bridge, weakened by rot, before the torrent of a spring flood.